The United States might have to switch off around 3 million of PCs all over the world that are infected with the DNSChanger trojan. That is, unless the court gives it an extension.
The government of the United States doesn’t actually want to do so, and decided to approach the courts to allow it to manage servers able to be connected to the DNSChanger Trojan. Nevertheless, if a court refuses, the services may go dark and the uses of the affected computers may lose their broadband connections.
6 individuals accused of operating and profiting from the botnet are likely to be extradited from their native country (Estonia) to face charges in the US. The DNSChanger trojan can modify settings on a host computer which tells the PC how to find online services on the web. The malware hijacks users’ search results and prevents them from visiting security websites that could help detect and delete the infections.
A New York district court ordered a private American firm to assume control over these servers. The plan was that Internet service providers and organizations would have time to identify and clean infected computers.
According to security experts, the surrogate control servers will operate until the 8th of March, but the cleanup process is expected to take much longer than expected. Over 3 million systems across the globe, including 500,000 in America, are still infected with the trojan. That’s why the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and NASA, is asking the judge to extend the deadline by over 4 months to provide broadband providers, private companies and the authorities with more time to clean up the mess. However, there are people believing that extending the deadline isn’t a good idea, because nothing will focus the people’s minds on cleaning up their PCs as well as a computer that doesn’t work.
The government of the United States doesn’t actually want to do so, and decided to approach the courts to allow it to manage servers able to be connected to the DNSChanger Trojan. Nevertheless, if a court refuses, the services may go dark and the uses of the affected computers may lose their broadband connections.
6 individuals accused of operating and profiting from the botnet are likely to be extradited from their native country (Estonia) to face charges in the US. The DNSChanger trojan can modify settings on a host computer which tells the PC how to find online services on the web. The malware hijacks users’ search results and prevents them from visiting security websites that could help detect and delete the infections.
A New York district court ordered a private American firm to assume control over these servers. The plan was that Internet service providers and organizations would have time to identify and clean infected computers.
According to security experts, the surrogate control servers will operate until the 8th of March, but the cleanup process is expected to take much longer than expected. Over 3 million systems across the globe, including 500,000 in America, are still infected with the trojan. That’s why the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and NASA, is asking the judge to extend the deadline by over 4 months to provide broadband providers, private companies and the authorities with more time to clean up the mess. However, there are people believing that extending the deadline isn’t a good idea, because nothing will focus the people’s minds on cleaning up their PCs as well as a computer that doesn’t work.
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